We invite those attending
the SAA meeting in Boston to come to the Science, Technology, and Health
Care (STHC) Roundtable meeting on Thursday, 5 August 2004, 5:30-7:00
p.m. The STHC Roundtable provides a forum for archivists with similar
interests or holdings in the natural, physical and social sciences, technology,
and health care, presenting an opportunity to exchange information, solve
problems, and share successes. We especially welcome STHC archivists
from the Boston area, as well as archivists who do not have a primary focus
in these fields but may have questions to ask or collection news to share.
We will be brainstorming proposed sessions for 2005, and want to hear
your ideas! We also encourage members to attend some of the STHC-sponsored
sessions <http://www.archivists.org/saagroups/sthc/announcements.html>

4. Program
Dr. Charles Weiner, Professor Emeritus in the Science, Technology, and Society
Program at MIT, will talk about the need to document community grass roots
organizations that develop in response to environmental, health or other
issues, and how archivists can proactively ensure that such efforts are
documented by oral histories projects and programs that actively seek such
records.

Dr. Weiner was
educated at Case Institute of Technology. He was Director of the
Center for History of Physics at the American Institute of Physics from
1965 to 1974, when he joined the MIT faculty. His research and writing
focus on the political, social and ethical dimensions of contemporary science
and the response of scientists to public controversies arising from their
work. He is currently completing a book on the history of social responsibility
in science from the atomic bomb to contemporary genetic engineering.

Also, Liz Andrews and
Nora Murphy of the MIT Institute Archives and Special Collections will talk
about the strengths of their collections and about their user communities.

6. Adjournment
Our
chief concern is to ensure that the STHC Roundtable reflects the interests
of its participants. We welcome all suggestions relating to the above
topics or concerning any other issues members might like to see addressed
at our meetings. Please don't hesitate to get in touch with either
of us:

The Stanford Linear
Accelerator Center marked its 40th anniversary the week of October 1,
2002 with celebrations for 1300 present and former staff and invited guests
from around the world. Speakers at the celebration, conducted in
a tent on the SLAC green, included Raymond Orbach, Director, US Department
Of Energy Office of Science; John Marburger, Director, US Office of Science
and Technology Policy, Executive Office of the President; Jonathan Dorfan,
Director of SLAC; W.K.H. Panofsky and Burton Richter, SLAC Directors Emeriti;
John Hennessy, President, Stanford University; Robert Birgeneau, President,
University of Toronto; and Haim Harari, Chair, Davidson Institute of Science
Education and Past President, Weizmann Institute of Science. When Panofsky,
SLAC’s first Director, approached the podium to give his talk, he was
greeted by a lengthy standing ovation from the overflow crowd.

The occasion was also marked with the publication of Stanford
Linear Accelerator Center Celebrating Forty Years: A Photo History.
Compiled from the SLAC Archives and History Office’s photo collections and
supplemented with photos and illustrations from the private collections
of staff members, the 123-page limited-edition book chronicles the achievements
of four decades of high-energy physics and synchrotron-radiation-related
research on the SLAC site. Early black-and-white photos trace the transformation
of the site from pasturelands to bustling laboratory, while later photos
record developments in scientific experimental apparatus and facilities,
as well as the achievements of SLAC scientists and staff – including 5 Nobel
prizes awarded for work conducted there in the past 40 years.

SLAC Archivists Jean Deken and Laura O’Hara, and Photo Researcher
Barbara Hoddy spent the better part of six months researching SLAC history,
reviewing and processing photo collections, scanning selected photos, writing
and vetting captions, and preparing copy for final design and layout.
The soft-cover, full-color book has been distributed to all staff and invited
40th anniversary guests as a souvenir, and is now available on the SLAC
web site at http://www.slac.stanford.edu/pubs/slacreports/slac-r-605.html
. Further information on the 2002 celebration and on SLAC history is
available from the celebration homepage, http://www-conf.slac.stanford.edu/40years/Default.htm,
and from the SLAC Archives and History Office site http://www.slac.stanford.edu/history.
June 2004

STHC institutions
are invited to submit photographs to the journal Issues in Science &
Technology for its back page photo feature Archives. Issues in
Science & Technology is published quarterly by the National Academies
and the University of Texas at Dallas as a forum for discussion of public
policy related to science, engineering, and medicine. By providing
a forum for discussion and debate Issues informs public opinion and raises
the quality of private and public decision-making.

The Archives feature began in 1997 and has primarily been drawn from
the holdings of the National Academies Archives. Archives has featured
seminal events in modern science such as the International Geophysical
Year, notable anniversaries (centennials of the Rockefeller University
and the Carnegie Institution of Washington), and significant persons and
institutions including Edison, a group photo of intelligence testing pioneers,
the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission, and Panama Canal construction.

The Academies’ limited photographic collections have been pretty
thoroughly mined, and our archivists and the Issues editor ask STHC members
to submit items from their collections for publication. STHC participation
will benefit the roundtable as well as Issues through the feature’s spotlight
on collections and institutions and its dissemination of programs and
projects. Please submit items and brief captions (50 - 100 words)
to kfinnera@nas.edu. Submissions
should include credit information and copyright information if your institution
is not the copyright holder.

Issues in Science and Technology and its editor Kevin Finneran (kfinnera@nas.edu) welcome submissions
from STHC institutions that highlight science and science policy and scientists
and policymakers. Offbeat or entertaining items are welcome.
Issues pays usage fees and for photo-reproduction, although digital images
are preferred.

As you may know,
the History News Service is an informal syndicate of professional historians who
write op-ed essays that contextualize current events in historical
terms. Those pieces that HNS distributes to over 300 daily and other
newspapers and news syndicates in North America cover many subjects
of topical interest. Yet one of the large, general areas in which HNS
receives almost no submissions from historians is that
of science, technology, and medicine. Newspaper articles dealing with science,
technology, and medicine appear on front pages almost every day, yet
HNS distributes no op-eds dealing with them.

As co-directors of
HNS, we are appealing to members of this listserv to consider submitting
to us op-ed essays for our consideration. Full information about
HNS--its aims and its procedures and useful guidelines for writing op-eds
that draw their arguments from historical knowledge--can be found at http://www.h-net.org/~hns/. We very
much hope that you on this list-serv will be in touch with us with any ideas
you may have for opeds essays that meet HNS criteria.

The Office of NIH History is pleased to announce our Summer 2004 newsletter.
Inside this issue you will find:
New exhibit announcements
What happened to the exhibits in the Clinical Center?
Anticipating the move to the CRC
NIH History Day is coming in September!
Check out the new NIH Health Information Page
A peek at the NIH Archive, 2003-2004
Oral Histories and donations
Staff and Stetten Fellow news
New Stetten Fellows announced
You can find the newsletter on our website at:http://history.nih.gov/about/newsletter_summer_2004.pdf

The Historical Collections Unit of the Lister Hill Library of the
Health Sciences, UAB, announces the Reynolds Associates Research Fellowship
In the History of the Health Sciences for 2005

The Reynolds Associates, in conjunction with the Historical Collections
(HC) unit of the Lister Hill Library, University of Alabama at Birmingham
(UAB), are pleased to announce the availability of short-term awards of
up to $1,000 to individual researchers studying one or more aspects of the
history of the health sciences during the 2005 calendar year. Intended to
support research using the HC unit as a historical resource, the fellowship
requires the on-site use of at least one of the units' three components,
which are the Alabama Museum of the Health Sciences, Reynolds Historical Library,
and UAB Archives.

Alabama Museum of
the Health Sciences - The Museum holds equipment, instruments, and objects
representing the history and development of the health sciences.
Among its holdings are the Nott pathological specimens, nineteen wax anatomical
models purchased by Dr. Josiah Nott (1804-1873) and originally brought
to Mobile, Alabama in October of 1860. The scope of the collection
includes, but is not limited to the fields of medicine, nursing, ophthalmology,
dentistry, public health, and allied health.

Reynolds Historical
Library collection focused on the history of the health sciences, the Reynolds
Library holds approximately 13,500 titles ranging in date from the 1450s
up to the early 20th century. The scope of the collection is broad with an
emphasis on the development of health care in Western Europe and the United
States. Anatomy, surgery, dentistry, ophthalmology, botanical medicine, electrotherapeutics,
Civil War medicine, southern medicine, and 19th century diagnosis and
therapeutics are some of the areas in which the library has especially
strong holdings.

UAB Archives - The
Archives contains over 1,700 linear feet of processed materials relating
to the medical school of the University of Alabama, the University of Alabama
at Birmingham, the Alabama health science community. Other primary
resource materials include personal papers, corporate records, and an
extensive collection of photographs. It is the official repository for
the Southern Surgical Association, Southeastern Society of Plastic and
Reconstructive Surgery, and the International Organization for Mycoplasmology.

Anyone, regardless of his or her academic status, who wishes to use
HC for historical research may apply. Fellowships are awarded to individual
applicants, not to institutions, as awarded funds are meant to help offset
the costs associated with visiting and utilizing HC and not for institutional
overhead (e.g. clerical costs, supplies, or other attendant project expenses).

Applicants should submit an outline of the proposed project and an
abstract (not to exceed 250 words) stating its general scope and purpose;
a budget listing travel and other attendant expenses; the length of the
anticipated visit; a brief curriculum vitae; and two letters of recommendation
(preferably from individuals familiar with the nature of the applicants
research and scholarly interests). All materials must be submitted
by December 31, 2004 to receive consideration. Awards will be
announced by February 28, 2005. Successful applicants will be expected
to deposit a copy of the finished manuscript, thesis, dissertation, or published
work with Historical Collections. For further information on the Historical
Collections unit at Lister Hill Library, UAB, please visit its web site
at http://www.uab.edu/historical/.

The Center for History of Physics, American Institute of Physics,
is pleased to announce its 2004 Grants to Archives program. The deadline
for applications is August 1, 2004. The grants are intended to make accessible
records, papers, and other primary sources that document the history of
modern physics, astronomy, geophysics, and allied fields. Grants may be
up to $5,000 each and can be used to cover direct expenses connected with
preserving, inventorying, arranging, describing, or cataloging appropriate
collections. Expenses may include staff salaries/benefits and archival storage
materials but not overhead or equipment.

The AIP History Center's mission is to help preserve and make known
the history of modern physics, astronomy, and allied fields, and the grant
program is intended to help support significant work to make original sources
accessible to researchers. Preference will accordingly be given to medium
size or larger projects for which the grant will be matched by the parent
organization or by other funding sources. For grant guidelines check the
Center's Web site at http://www.aip.org/history/grntgde.htm
or call 301 209-3165. Inquiries are welcome, and sample proposals are available
on request. A list of previous grant recipients is on our Web site.

The Science, Technology, and Health Care Roundtable will be meeting
on Thursday, August 5, 2004 from 5:30 p.m. - 7:00 p.m. For the
agenda see "Message from
the Co-Chairs". Note that this is a change from our regular time
slot.

Come and join us in
"Exploring the Micro-Universe" tour. The tour will take visitors
to the Whitehead Institute (located at the edge of the MIT campus), a
leading research and educational institution in biomedical sciences.
While the Whitehead Institute is affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology in its teaching activities, it is fully independent in its
research programs, governance, and finance. Its research programs
range from cancer and infectious disease research, structural biology, genetics,
and developmental biology research, to transgenic science. Research
efforts at the former Center for Genome Research, the largest federally
funded center for genome mapping and sequencing in the United States, contributed
one third of the human genome sequence announced in June 2000.
In spring 2003, Whitehead, MIT, and Harvard entered into an unparalleled
partnership, promoting the natural outgrowth of the Genome Center into
the Broad Institute. The Broad is poised to become a world leader
in the development of genetics-based medicine. After a brief overview
of the Whitehead Institute’s history, visitors, guided by the Whitehead
Institute fellows, will have a chance to see the research facilities and
to visit the newly formed Broad Institute.

The tour will end at the Institute Archives and Special Collections
of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with an exhibit of selected
archival and manuscript materials from the holdings.

RSVP by July 19, 2004
to Ewa M. Basinska, Institute Archives
and Special Collections, MIT, Room 14N-118, Cambridge, MA 02139, 617-258-5533.
Please include Whitehead Tour in the subject line of your e-mail message.

Waverly LowellEnvironmental Design Archives, University of California Berkeley"Paradigm Found: Working with Standard Series Descriptions"

Julie Demeter
The Bancroft Library, University of California Berkeley"The Strength Is in the Structure: Standard Series for Engineering
and Science Faculty Collections"

John P. Rees
National Library of Medicine, History of Medicine Division"Tag'em and Bag'em: Standard Series for Biomedical Research Collections"

Developing standard
series description help solve a variety of challenges faced by the modern
archivist. Effective resource allocation, streamlining processing, assisting
appraisal, and translating technical language to various researcher audiences
are but a few. One archivist will discuss the successful application
of the standard series paradigm and how it can be applied across the archival
enterprise. Two archivists will then explore their experiences developing
common series description for engineering, science faculty, and biomedical
scientist papers.

Rare Books and Special Collections at the Francis A. Countway
Library of Medicine:
Challenges of Acquisition and Access

Donna Webber

Manuscript
CuratorCountway Library of Medicine
Harvard University

From a paper given at New England Archivists Meeting, March
2004, by Donna Webber

Rare Books and Special Collections department (RBSC) in the Francis
A. Countway Library of Medicine at Harvard Medical School houses a wide
range of material in the history of medicine. Although the department
faces many of the same challenges as other collecting repositories to acquire
materials and provide access to users, there are some unique problems caused
by institutional needs and the subject of the collection.

The holdings of Rare Books and Special Collections are impressive:
a quarter of a million rare books, including the largest collection of
medical incunabula held by a medical library in the United States; over
900 manuscript collections totaling 10,000 cubic feet; 2,500 cubic feet
of archival records from the Harvard Medical School, Harvard School of
Dental Medicine, and Harvard School of Public Health; 30,000 photographs
and prints; and 15,000 items in the Warren Anatomical Museum. The subject
of this paper is the manuscript collection, and the challenges of acquiring
manuscripts and making them accessible for research.

The manuscript collection is strong in New England medical history
in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but the focus of the collection
begins to change in the twentieth, reflecting the growth of the Medical
School. As Harvard began to develop at the turn of the twentieth century
into a modern educational and research institution, and as the school,
its faculty, and its activities expanded to employ thousands engaged in
teaching and cutting-edge medical research, it was inevitable that the focus
of manuscript collecting narrowed to the Harvard Medical School community:
a world of teaching and research inhabited by pre-clinical faculty and
researchers on the campus, and the research and clinical staff of eighteen
affiliated hospitals and research centers.

The collections of Harvard faculty contain correspondence, memoranda,
reports, photographs, slides, film, audio, video, and other electronic
media. Syllabi, lectures, notes, exams, and correspondence with students,
faculty, and administrators describe teaching activities. There are some
research data, but research programs and projects are mainly documented through
correspondence, reports, speeches, and reprints. Administrative correspondence,
memoranda, and reports record the operational activities of the units in
which people work. There are some patient records, but most large
runs of patient records at RBSC can usually be found in the records of
defunct hospitals. Correspondence, minutes, and reports reflect professional
and consulting activities. Sometimes there are personal papers about
family and friends. Overall, the collections document the development
of medical education and research in New England, and Boston in particular,
and the influence of Harvard faculty on the larger medical community.
But the potential for research use is far beyond what the record creators
may have imagined. Collections can be used for family histories;
for studies of changes in medical care and treatment, the attitude of the
public toward the medical profession and the interest in alternative medicine,
the roles of minorities and women in medicine, and the development of managed
care; for research on social change in the United States - in short,
to study an unlimited number of topics.

Although Rare Books and Special Collections has narrowed modern collecting
to Harvard, an embarrassment of riches creates many challenges for acquisitions.
For most significant faculty before World War II there are at least small
collections, and for many there are large ones. But in the postwar
era, government research money led to a large increase in the number of
faculty, and the photocopier has resulted in much larger collections.
As in any other repository, a collecting policy, an appraisal policy, and
an active and thoughtful program of solicitation are necessary to help
identify what to collect. But with a faculty numbering over 10,000,
Rare Books cannot collect comprehensively. The staff must choose
which areas will be documented and which will not.

Most of the department’s modern collections are acquired as gifts
from faculty and staff, although older non-Harvard manuscripts may be purchased
from dealers. The staff tries to identify the leaders among the tenured
faculty and work with them to bring their collections to Rare Books now
or in the future. Through mailings, presentations to groups, and individual
meetings, faculty members are encouraged to donate papers in the subject
areas considered a priority for documentation.

Faculty members respond to our interest with varying degrees of enthusiasm.
Many are thrilled at the department’s interest in their lives, or the
lives of their mentors, teachers, and colleagues. Others are somewhat
bemused, certain that whatever they have accomplished is adequately documented
in the professional literature. Eventually, many of the faculty members
directly solicited enter into negotiation.

As the staff looks to the future, Rare Books and Special Collections
faces the challenge of documenting medicine in an environment where the
volume of paper continues to grow while its research value appears to
diminish. As the heart of holdings – correspondence, reports, and
notes about administrative activities, research, and teaching – disappears
into hard drives, servers, or floppy discs, the staff is working to contribute
to the development of online recordkeeping systems on campus so that records
created today survive to be collected and used in the future.

But as the staff keeps one eye on the future, the other is firmly
concentrated on the large backlog still needing attention. Many steps
must be taken before Rare Books and Special Collections manuscript collections
can be made accessible for research use. Although eighteenth and nineteenth
century collections are mostly processed, they are described to an item
level in thousands of catalog cards available only in the reading room.
There are no finding aids for these collections; some have bibliographic
records of varying quality in RLIN and HOLLIS, the Harvard online catalog.
Currently the staff is engaged in a long-term project to upgrade bibliographic
records to reflect current standards; it will be many years before there
are finding aids for all the collections that need them.

For the twentieth century collections, a combination of staff, interns,
and project staff are slowly beginning to work their way through 8,000
to 9,000 cubic feet of papers. The goal is to have bibliographic records
in RLIN and HOLLIS for all collections, and encoded finding aids for those
that merit them. But even relying on a flexible approach to levels
of processing, it will take many years to make the collections physically
and electronically available.

Providing access to collections that contain restricted material
is another challenge in Rare Books and Special Collections. Although
some repositories allow researchers to use unprocessed collections, Rare
Books does not because of institutional restrictions, concern for privacy,
and federal restrictions to patient information.

Like many private institutions, Harvard University has established
access policies to collections containing university records. These
are 50 years for all administrative records, and 80 years for records
containing personal information. Identifying this kind of information
in a manuscript collection is time-consuming. All of the medical
staff in the hospitals are also Harvard faculty; any of them may have
copies of university records among their papers, and finding them takes
time. Once a collection is processed and the restricted information
identified, it is listed in the finding aid, and researchers may apply for
access.

Patient records and information create an equally difficult challenge.
It is relatively easy to identify and restrict a patient record, that
is, a record where the card, in an older collection, or a folder in a
more modern collection, has a patient’s name on the label, and is often
part of an alphabetical sequence of records. But information about
patients may be found in places other than patient records, including teaching
folders, where physicians used current cases as examples for students.
Patient information may have been used or referred in writing a professional
article and may be buried in folders containing drafts of those articles.
Patient information may be found in a folder about a conference, or in
folders about clinical research. Patient information is frequently
located in correspondence between physicians, as part of general correspondence
files. Such information is pervasive and time-consuming to find, but
must be identified to protect the privacy of patients.

Until HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability
Act, Rare Books and Special Collections department applied Harvard
access restrictions of 80 years to patient information. Having to
follow Harvard University restrictions and patient information restrictions
created the temptation to focus on processing older collections, or those
that were least likely to have Harvard or patient information. While this
made processing easier, it frustrated researchers and reference staff eager
to use more current collections.

Harvard counsel has interpreted HIPAA to mean that researchers can
have access to collections containing patient information as long as they
follow the HIPAA described Institutional Review Board [IRB] process. Researchers
fill out IRB forms; the IRB reviews the application to verify researchers’
needs for collections containing patient information. Once approved,
researchers can use the collection while promising not to release any private
information about patients they may see. Rare Books and Special
Collections no longer has to close without appeal the parts of collections
containing patient information that is less than 80 years old. There
is one group of exceptions: collections for which gift agreements
were acquired before HIPAA are administered under the 80-year restriction
policy.

The flexibility possible under HIPAA allows Rare Books and Special
Collections to open processed collections containing patient records
more quickly, although the amount of work for processors is the same.
As historians of science and medicine examine issues of the post-World
War II era, their need for more modern collections, and the department’s
increased ability to provide them, make for much more successful reference
service than in the past.

Although the presence of private health information in our collections
adds an additional obstacle to efforts to make manuscript collections
accessible, what this overview demonstrates is that Rare Books and Special
Collections manages problems similar to those at any collecting repository,
especially institutional repositories. There is a large unprocessed
backlog. Electronic records are creating challenges for documenting
contemporary and future activities. Privacy may be a larger issue
to Rare Books and Special Collections than to a non-medical collection,
but balancing staff resources, the needs of users, and the rights of third
party privacy in collections are issues common to all archivists.May 2004

Engineering and Science Research Laboratories at MIT

Elizabeth AndrewsInstitute Archives and Special Collections
Massachussets Institute of Technology

At
MIT, as was the case at many other educational institutions with strong
science and engineering programs, research laboratories flourished on
campus after World War II ended in 1945. MIT was one of the institutions
that benefited from an infusion of government money that led to new areas
of research or allowed to continue threads of inquiry begun during intensive
wartime projects.

Administrators and staff at MIT were attuned to the potential of
special research laboratories because the campus was host to the large
radar research and development program (Radiation Laboratory, Division
14 of NDRC [National Defense Research Committee]) from 1940 to 1945. The
special mix of people and the successful working environment of the Radiation
Laboratory have frequently been noted through the years.(1)
Karl Compton, MIT president in 1945, sought to capture the best of the Radiation
Laboratory by working out a plan with the government to close the Laboratory,
but to do that as a conversion to a facility with the same collegiality
and inter-disciplinary inspiration for a broader range of unclassified peace
time projects. On January 1, 1946, the Radiation Laboratory name changed
temporarily to the Basic Research Division and then on July 1st of the same
year, MIT took custody and renamed it the Research Laboratory for Electronics.
Future MIT presidents Julius Stratton (term 1946-1949) and Jerome Wiesner
(term 1952-1961) served as directors.

The Institute Archives and Special Collections staff recently had
a chance to go back to the formative years of government sponsored projects
when we received a large amount of additional materials created by the
Servomechanisms Laboratory and its successor, the Electronic Systems Laboratory,
and were able to integrate these with the records already in our custody.(2) These two laboratories have roots dating back to
1940, while their activities extended to1978.

The Servomechanisms Laboratory’s beginning years, 1940-1945, coincided
with World War II. Its focus was basic research and application
of feedback control to automate navy and army gun control systems, and
the development of servo-controls for advanced radar systems. At MIT Harold
Hazen of the electrical engineering department and doctoral advisor to Gordon
Brown, was working on control mechanisms.(3) In response
to a request from the U.S. Navy for specialized training in fire control
for several of its naval officers assigned to MIT, two elective courses
(6.605 and 6.606) titled “Theory of Servo Mechanisms” and “Applications
of Servo Mechanisms” were offered in the fall of 1939. Gordon Brown
taught the courses and served as the first director the Servomechanisms
Laboratory when it formed in 1940.

Memos, technical reports, and writings comprise the bulk of Servomechanisms
Laboratory documents, and materials documenting post-war projects constitute
a major part of the collection. A small set of records represent
one of the major post-war projects directed by Jay Forrester. This project,
originally called the Aircraft Stability and Control Analyzer Project (ASCA),
was in development for the U.S. Navy to produce an operational flight
simulator. As the focus shifted from the simulator to development and
production of one of the first high-speed digital computers, the project
was renamed “Whirlwind”. This research project broke off from the
Servomechanisms Laboratory to become the MIT Digital Computer Laboratory.
Additional records on Project Whirlwind can be found in MIT’s Digital Computer
Laboratory collection (AC 362). A complete set of Whirlwind engineering
memos and reports, individually listed and catalogued, is held by the MIT
Libraries. Oral histories with some of the principals of servomechanisms
research can be found at the Charles Babbage Institute Archives, at the University
of Minnesota. In addition, American Institute of Physics holds some
Whirlwind reports.

Researchers interested in nuclear reactors will also find information
in the MIT Servomechanisms Laboratory records. Servomechanisms
staff contributed to the design and construction of controls for the
reactor rods for the Brookhaven National Laboratory nuclear reactor. The
most relevant documents include engineering memos, reports, including
drawings dating from 1947 to1949.

The development of numerical controls systems from 1949 to 1959
at the Servomechanisms Laboratory had a profound impact on industry as
the introduction of automated controls revolutionized the machine tool
industry. Project documentation about numerical control research
and its applications comprise the greatest amount and richest documentation
in the collection, consisting of 30 manuscript boxes of reports, computation
books, engineering reports and memos, and 5 flat boxes of technical drawings.

The later phase (mid-1950s) of numerical control research was documented
by a project run by the Servomechanisms Laboratory’s Computer Application
Group, led by Douglas T. Ross. The group worked on the problem of
automatic programming, developing the Automatically Programmed Tool Language
(APT).(4)

Similar material can be found in the Electronic Systems Laboratory’s
records (AC 528), the bulk of which consist of progress memos and reports
about technical aspects of projects. Computer aided design projects are
an important topic in this collection (AC 528). Another set of documents
that may be of particular interest to those in the information field are
records relating to Project Intrex (Information Transfer Experiments). The
goal of the research was to develop indexing, searching, and retrieval of
bibliographic data - project collaborators included libraries and the newspaper
industry.

What is especially gratifying to collections and reference staff
of the Archives is that the laboratory records are complemented by a larger
number of additional collections, primarily faculty papers that are already
a part of the holdings of the MIT Archives. They include the papers
of Servomechanisms and ESL directors Gordon Brown and Francis Reintjes.

MIT’s continuing commitment to research centers can be followed
in administrative records at the MIT Archives, in the records of the
Office of the President, and in the Office of the Provost. For
instance, fifteen years after serving as the first director of the Research
Laboratory for Electronics, Julius Stratton, by then MIT’s president,
made funding for research centers one of the key goals of MIT’s Second
Century fundraising campaign, launched in the spring of 1960.

The number of research centers and laboratories has continued to
grow in the last sixty years(5) and government sponsorship
has raised within MIT the issue of classified research a number of times.(6) In 1951 Lincoln Laboratory (which has its own Archives)
was spun off as an affiliated but off-campus entity to carry out federally
funded classified electronics research. The Distant Early Warning
System and ballistic missile defense were two of its early projects.
During the late 1960s protests against defense-related research on the
main campus prompted the appointment of the Review Panel on Special Laboratories,
which studied the role of the Instrumentation Laboratory and led to the
divestiture of the laboratory from MIT in 1973 to an independent Draper
Laboratory. The Archives holds the records of the Review Panel (AC 54).
Those records have often been studied by researchers interested in campus
issues. The most recent revisiting of issues involving classified research
have been prompted by 9/11 events and can be followed in the MIT newspaper.(7)

The interdisciplinary model, which the government funded heavily
on campus, was in turn presented to the government as a model for a federal
agency by former MIT president Julius Stratton who served as chairman
of the presidential Commission on Marine Science, Engineering, and Research
from 1967 to 1969. In their final report, Our Nation and the Sea, the
commission members recommended that a national agency (NOAA) be formed
to meet the multiple scientific interests in the ocean environment.
NOAA administrative structure was to be based on an interdisciplinary model
originated at MIT.

Interestingly, it was the final demise of the old Radiation Laboratory’s
“Building 20”(8), a temporary building put up in 1943--one
of several wooden structures to house the Radiation Laboratory-- that
prompted the transfer of the last of the Servomechanisms and Electronic
Systems Laboratory records. Building 20 was finally torn down in
1998 to make way for the Stata Center, a campus building designed by architect
Frank Gehry.(9) In preparation for their planned
move into the Stata Center in spring 2004, staff at the Laboratory for
Information and Decision Systems (LIDS), a successor lab to Electronic
Systems Laboratory, alerted Archives staff to the stash of early documents
and drawings in LIDS storage rooms.

The records of the Servomechanisms Laboratory and the Electronics
Systems Laboratory described here document the early years and evolution
of large, government-sponsored projects on college campuses. One
can see how scientists and engineers worked in the post-war years to solve
multi-faceted, interdisciplinary scientific and technological problems.
Staff members of the Institute Archives and Special Collections are currently
working on strategies to document similar research efforts and developments
from the more recent times.

3. Wilde, Karl. A Century of Electrical Engineer
at MIT, 1882-1982, p. 212.

4. A detailed discussion of the technology
of numerical control and its application and adoption by industry can
be found in Numerical Control, by J. Francis Reintjes. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1991.

8. The Stata Center research building is
a potential tourist stop on the list for SAA attendees in Boston.
If you take a quick trip to the Cambridge side of the river by “T”
to Kendall Square/MIT and walk a block up Main Street, you can view the
Stata Center (aka building 32 on the MIT campus map) across the street
from the Whitehead Institute.

Gabor PalloInstitute for Philosophical Research
Hungarian Academy of Sciences

In the 20th century,
political and economic conditions forced many people to leave their own
countries and start new lives somewhere else. For scholars, migration provided
an opportunity to live and work in a different intellectual environment.
Hungarian scientists migrated to several countries, including Germany, Israel,
Britain, and the USA, where they participated in highly important scientific
projects, including efforts to build a nuclear bomb and construct early
computers. Many of them, including Philipp Lenard, Albert Szent-Györgyi,
George de Hevesy, George Bekesy, Eugene Wigner, Dennis Gabor, and George
Olah won the Nobel Prize.

As a historian of Hungarian science, I became interested in the life and
work of migrating scientists, intrigued by the fact that relatively many
of them became highly successful after they left Hungary. I would like
to find an answer to the question why the scientific conditions in some
countries proved to be more favorable and intellectually stimulating than
the conditions they encountered in Hungary.

Following lives and professional activities of the members of that special
group, I experienced pleasures and frustrations of conducting archival research
in several countries outside Hungary. In this article, I will try
to share some of those experiences in order to show that the results of
historical research may depend not only on the ideas of the researcher,
but also on the feasibility of the project. In my case, that means
availability and access to the historical documents. The pleasures
of conducting research in different archives are many – visiting beautiful
cities, working on lively academic campuses, dining and talking with many
interesting people. Frustrations come from the differences in rules,
conditions, procedures, and customs in archival repositories in various countries.
The rules for granting permission to use historical collections and study
restricted documents can be entirely different in archival repositories in
Stockholm, Jerusalem, or New York.

For instance, conducting research on the life and work of George de Hevesy
(1885-1966), who received the Nobel Prize in 1943 for his work on radioactive
tracers, takes a researcher to Budapest, Copenhagen, Berlin, Freiburg, and
Stockholm. In Stockholm, the Nobel Archives of the Royal Academy of
Science provides easy access to archival materials created more than fifty
years ago. The records created later are closed. In addition,
according to the strict rules of the Nobel Prize system, only the final
decisions and nominations are officially recorded, while the discussions
leading to those decisions are not documented. This is why the choice
of a Nobel Prize winner may often seem to be so mysterious. Since
the rules of the Nobel Archives are clearly spelled out, a researcher knows
what to expect when he or she decides to work there.

While following the steps of George de Hevesy had been relatively simple,
conducting research on Leo Szilard proved to be much more complicated.
Leo Szilard (1898-1964), a physicist, was born in Budapest. After
graduating from high school there, he completed his university studies in
Germany. His important papers on information theory were published
in Berlin. In 1933 he went to England, where he patented an idea for
developing a nuclear chain reaction. Several years later, Szilard
immigrated to the United States. In 1939 he persuaded Albert Einstein,
his old friend from Germany, to sign a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt
calling the President’s attention to the political importance of nuclear
energy. This letter proved to be the first crucial step leading to
a top-secret, highest-priority program, later known as the Manhattan Project,
to build an atomic bomb. Even before the first bomb was deployed in
Japan, Szilard became an avid advocate against its use. Later on, he
worked towards imposing limits on nuclear arms.

It is not surprising that only a few records documenting Szilard’s life
can be found in the Hungarian archives. Some materials from his student
years are held by the Archives of the Technical University of Budapest,
and there is a commemorative plaque on his family house in Budapest.
He was too young when he left Hungary to leave many traces around.
Szilard liked to keep his most important documents in one suitcase, so he
could take everything with him if forced to flee at a moment’s notice.
Yet, I found some interesting archival materials in the Bodleian Library
in Oxford. Information about migrating scientists can be found among
the records of the Academy Assistance Council that assisted many scholars
fleeing from Nazi Germany. The records of the Emergency Committee for
Aid of Displaced Scientists, at the New York Public Library, provide documentation
of similar efforts undertaken in America. A difference in levels of
description, quality of existing finding aids, and overall access to archival
materials made my research in the manuscript room of the New York Public
Library much more difficult than in Oxford.

A collection of Szilard’s papers is deposited in the library of the University
of California - San Diego, in La Jolla. During my visit there, more
than twenty years ago, a huge part of the collection was hardly processed.
As a result, I failed to get access to correspondence between Szilard and
Einstein that, I suspected, might have included drafts of the letter to
President Roosevelt. The relevant materials were removed from the
collection. To my great dismay, instead of the records I eagerly
wanted to study I found only blue slips of paper marking their original
location. This experience left me quite perplexed, because at the
same time archival materials describing Szilard’s role in the Manhattan
Project held by the National Archives in Washington, DC, were easily accessible,
even to those who, like myself, came from the Soviet camp.

I experienced similar frustrations while researching Imre Lakatos (1922-1974),
a mathematician and philosopher of science. Born in Hungary in 1924,
Lakatos left for Britain in 1956. After several years in Cambridge,
where he worked with Richard B. Braithwaite, Lakatos succeeded Karl Popper
at the London School of Economics. Before that, however, Lakatos had
a remarkable career in Hungary. He joined the Communist Party during
World War II, soon becoming one of its activists. As a fervent believer
in the communist theory and a skillful politician, he became responsible
for screening out “non-reliable” faculty members from the universities.
In 1949, after losing the confidence of party leaders, Lakatos was sent
to the Soviet Union to study physics in Moscow. Several months later,
recalled from Moscow, he was sentenced and imprisoned in a communist labor
camp in a small Hungarian village, Recsk. After his release in
1952, Lakatos was employed at the Institute of Mathematics of the Hungarian
Academy of Sciences as a researcher. He did not resume any overt
political activity. And yet, he worked as an informer for the secret
police, denouncing even his closest friends. Shortly before the 1956
Hungarian revolution, he gradually became more active and critical of the
communist regime. Fearing political retaliation, Lakatos emigrated
to England in 1956.

By the 1980s, Lakatos’ name had been almost forgotten in Hungary.
Only a small circle of philosophers of science knew about his work, but
even they were too young to have any memory or knowledge of his Hungarian
past. When I started doing research on him in the early 1990s, after
the collapse of the communist system, Lakatos had been dead for almost twenty
years (he died in 1974). Through oral history interviews with his
old acquaintances living in Budapest, I pieced together the basic facts,
learned about his activities in more detail, and started understanding why
many people are still become uneasy when they hear his name.

I failed, however, to confirm what I had learned from such interviews by
examining archival documents. Whenever I hoped to find any written
records about Lakatos in archival repositories in Hungary, I either found
removal slips, or I was told that the materials are not open to the public.
Such a situation was not uncommon in Hungary at that time of transition,
when many people were afraid to reveal their past activities. However,
to my great surprise, when in 1993 I visited the manuscript section of the
library at the London School of Economics, I did not get access to Lakatos’s
papers either. The finding aid, helpful but incomplete, listed names
of selected correspondents, some of them marked with asterisks. The
marked items, which I suspected might have been relevant to my research,
were closed. I was unable to see those files, even though I received
permission from library officials to study Lakatos’s papers. Several
years later, the whole collection became open. Jancis Long was allowed
to use it when she was writing Lakatos’s biography (Jancis Long, "Lakatos
in Hungary", Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 28,1998, 245-311).

The archives of the British ministry of home affairs proved to be even
more secretive. Lakatos applied for British citizenship twice, and
both times his application was turned down. My inquiries about the
reasons behind those refusals – I suspected that they might shed a new light
on his political activities – met with no response. It was perplexing.
At the time of my inquiry, Lakatos had been already dead for twenty years.
Since he left no relatives, it was very unlikely that anybody would object
to any facts of his life being published. I also failed to succeed
to get an answer to my further inquiry regarding why my request was left
unanswered and what conditions have to be fulfilled in order to receive such
information. To this day I do not understand why British authorities
denied Lakatos the right to become a British subject in spite of his status
as a renowned professor of philosophy at the London School of Economics.
Is it possible that even in the early 1970s the Home Office considered his
political contacts too dangerous? I have no idea. Archival
research may be impeded for a variety of reasons in different countries.

My research on Albert Szent-Györgyi (1893-1986), a Nobel Prize winner
in biochemistry, provides yet another example of impediments I encountered
during archival work. Szent-Györgyi was born and educated in
Hungary. After World War I, he worked in different European countries
for brief periods until 1927 when, as a Rockefeller fellow, he joined the
laboratory of Frederick G. Hopkins in Cambridge, England. In 1930,
he was appointed head of the medical chemistry department of a newly-created
Hungarian university in Szeged. Soon thereafter, he became actively
involved in a political fight against Nazism in Hungary. In 1947,
seeing no real future for his scientific research within the Soviet-style
socialist system (even though he was much appreciated at that time by the
authorities), Szent-Györgyi emigrated to the United States.

The Rockefeller Foundation generously supported the development of the
Szeged University, and its records stored at the Rockefeller Archive Center
in North Tarrytown, NY, provide a thorough documentation of this support.
The records include extensive files of correspondence between the officers
of the Foundation and Szent-Györgyi, who chaired the committee appointed
by the university to allocate funds among different academic departments.
The Rockefeller Center is a paradise for a scholar working on migrating
scientists – set in beautiful surroundings, it offers excellent service,
easy access to its rich, well-organized resources, and high-quality finding
aids describing the archival collections. In addition, it provides
research grants enabling scholars to pursue their work at the Center.
The materials related to Szent-Györgyi pertain to his return to Hungary
in 1930, to his activities during the next seventeen years, and to his subsequent
emigration and difficult settlement in the United States.

I was less fortunate with the archives of another American foundation,
the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, in New York, in 1999. Because support
from this foundation was acknowledged in some of Szent-Györgyi important
publications written in Hungary, I became interested in its policies.
I also wanted to examine Szent-Györgyi’s application papers and learn
why he, a faculty member of an unknown university in a small rural town in
Hungary, was selected to receive a grant. After corresponding with
the Foundation, I visited its offices and received a thin envelope with several
photocopied pages containing some basic facts. I was unable to get
access to the archival materials and did not have a chance to meet the director
to explain again why it was so important for me to be able to examine their
archives. She might have liked to hear about the wise decision made
by his predecessors to support research efforts that led to a Nobel Prize.
I am still baffled why the Foundation has remained so secretive about sixty-year
old records documenting activities that took place in the 1930s.

I suspect that crucial correspondence regarding Szent-Györgyi’s professional
activities may still remain in private hands. His most famous work,
on the isolation of vitamin C, was done in collaboration with Joseph Sviberly,
a graduate student of Charles G. King, a professor in Pittsburgh, PA.
Sviberly corresponded with his professor and reported on the results of
his research with Szent-Györgyi. Because of that, or for some
other reasons, King published the results of his work on vitamin C shortly
before Szent-Györgyi. After a fierce priority debate, the Nobel
Prize Committee chose Szent-Györgyi as the Nobel Prize winner.
Nevertheless, some members of the scientific community were, and maybe still
are, of the opinion that the Nobel Prize Committee had made a mistake.
Unfortunately, the location of the correspondence between King and Sviberly,
to the best of my knowledge, remains unknown. If it is held in private
hands somewhere in America, there is hardly a chance for a Hungarian researcher
to be able to see it.

It is unfortunate that the University of Szeged has no archival repository
where one could expect to find materials documenting its early years, including
records of the financial assistance from the Rockefeller Foundation, of
Szent-Györgyi’s organizational activities, and of the expenditures
his laboratory made using Rockefeller and Macy funds. Taking into
account the fact that Szent-Györgyi’s Nobel Prize has been the only
one awarded to a scholar living and working in Hungary at the time the award
was granted, this lack of interest in preserving institutional records is
even more troubling.

To summarize, I would like to stress the importance of conducting historical
research about migrating scientists, which can encourage and inform a better
understanding of cross-political and cross-cultural currents in society
as a whole. It is also, as I describe in this paper, a source of unexpected
and not always welcome adventures for a historian undertaking such a study.
Funding presents yet another important issue. It would be very helpful
to find out who might be interested in supporting this kind of multinational
and multicultural studies. Travel, local accommodations, photocopies,
and other related expenses make this type of research much more expensive
than the “safe” work conducted in one’s own country. While differences
in archival policies and procedures among archival repositories worldwide
may be unavoidable, the final results of a given historical study may be
to a large extent determined by the archival rules of relevant repositories.

In conclusion, I would like to argue in favor of increased digitization
of records relevant to the history of science. Placing archival materials
on the Internet would provide a common database for all interested researchers
and eliminate the need to hunt for specific financial and historical resources.
This would equalize the opportunities of all researchers and make their
work less dependent on circumstances beyond their control. May 2003

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